“Those who make themselves look bigger on borrowed power are essentially living according to other people’s value systems.”
Impersonating someone else, with the intention of manipulating public perception, is a childhood no-no. ‘Be your truest self’, people say. ‘You are worth it!’; ‘Why be someone else when you are so special just as you are!’ I’m pretty sure I’ve seen such adages stamped on co-workers’ laptops and Stanley cups. It’s surely valuable to practice radical acceptance as it relates to ourselves and our abilities. Radical acceptance might look like writing out a list of the many ways we’ve contributed to a problem. Or it may be a tacit promise to ourselves that we will not complain about things we choose not to address. This everyday practice is utilized everywhere, from patients in psychotherapy to corporate executives struggling to gain respect from the peons that are their employees. It’s a useful strategy if executed in appropriate dosages; to understand thyself without argument or resistance is the surest path to improving upon that which we suck at. But is there such thing as being too accepting?
We can become passively approving of behaviors in ourselves and in others that most would find repugnant simply by virtue of being around them for a considerable period of time. This social phenomenon has been referred to in some circles as “bamboozlement” or by Tony Soprano as “being had”. I’ve seen this reality-warping in special education fields thousands of times, by now: Rules and boundaries, bad! Permissiveness and feelings, good! I once worked on a case with a special needs client who trespassed into a gated community, broke into a stranger’s car, stole the stranger’s belongings, and received zero consequence, zero jailtime, or even so much as a talking-to by local authorities. The response on the part of staff: “Well… what would jail actually do? He has special needs. It would just be traumatizing.” What becomes normal is not necessarily reflect what’s right, what’s sensical, or what’s needed. Being around low standards for long enough, in the name of “helping”, is truly poisonous and contagious. Poor thinking is circulated often enough that we radically accept it as factual. What would have ultimately benefited this client would have been something that probably pissed him off initially. But feeling hurt and progressing forward are not mutually exclusive.
Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Alas, our “mental health” still remains truant. But how can this be? How can we have more specialized therapists, more “compassionate care”, more trainings on mental health, and psychiatrists lulling our mismanaged personality problems with drugs… and still see such problems? How can we spend 5 years teaching a client a skill only for them to seemingly suffer amnesia at the hint of one little compulsion, one little environmental trigger? Is this what “helping” is? Well… it shouldn’t be. When skills are only “mastered” in one setting with a safe person, and are not tested under more realistic demands and circumstances, we cannot be surprised when people eventually revert back to their usual kinks. And, because so many millennials have developed our careers asynchronously online, and without any requirement for real-world retesting, we wouldn’t even recognize that our clients are dependent on treatment. Or that we are dependent on whatever digital crutch we’ve fallen prey to. We see them as successful in session because of us, and we exploit these successes as proof of our product. But it’s always found out eventually as faulty.
Enter David Goggins. Goggins has grown increasingly popular over the years, and maybe rightfully so. He’s a militant and comical Navy SEAL with a knack for reminding us that we’re all little bitches who are not working nearly as hard as we’d like to believe. An increasing trend has been the claim that we’re “just like David Goggins, and the world would be a better place if more people were like that.” Firstly, it’s imperative we understand that we are not like David Goggins simply because we like to tell people the blunt truth. An important factor in being brutally honest with people is to be respectful enough to stick around for their reaction, and continue to show them positive regard despite defensiveness or even hostility. How many people do you know can do that? Anyone, literally anyone, can tell someone to “get over it” via email or text message. But can we muster up the courage to tell someone we very much like, face to face, that they’re being irrational and selfish? Can we stick to our guns when they inevitably respond like children? Can we respect a person anyway, despite these traits we may find reprehensible?
To be even remotely David-Goggins-esque, we must admit that we take a liking to projecting this persona onto other people, but we would prefer to only receive compliments or surface-level critique in return. I frankly do not know anybody who claims to be like David Goggins that has demonstrated resilience in the face of crushing feedback. To cower into ourselves, I believe, is human nature. There is no masterclass in the digital world that will serve to dampen the sting of tough criticism and truthful feedback; that is only accomplished through repeated exposure to tough criticism and truthful feedback. If you find yourself wanting to engender the curt candor of Goggins, ask yourself: Have I approached myself with brutal honesty first? Have I been kind to myself by brutally and unabashedly evaluating my faults? What are my faults and defaults when I’m pissed? Can I explain my failures without mentioning other people as contributing factors? Is my thinking actually accurate, or am I pretending to be something or someone else? Is my perspective accurate, or is this thinking more of a habit? When I get irritated by other people, is it because I’m guilty of the same thing? Do I have the experience and expertise to help another person with this? Have I earned the right to treat other people the way I want to? Bluntness is an earned right.
Shane Parrish of Farnam Street states in his book, Clear Thinking, “The person who wants to be seen as great shows the world how to manipulate them.” With so much remote work allowing us to pretend to be great versus actually beinggreat, it’s imperative our younger generations learn to practice discernment when presented with information. Do I believe this because it’s true? How do I know it’s true? Or do I find myself believing it because I like the person saying it?Confidence typically results from what psychologists refer to as “self-efficacy”, or the prevailing belief a person has in their own abilities and skills. Unearned confidence is that which is built by gullibility: skimming an article we find interesting and suddenly feeling like we have expertise in the subject, or attending a 2-hour lecture and deciding we’re knowledgeable enough to make a podcast episode about why everyone else is mistaken about it. True success, and true knowledge, involve an extensive track record of applying what we learn successfully. It’s less about the size of our mental archives but more about how we use the knowledge we do have. There are very obvious, straight forward ways to regain control of our critical thought, and none of them involve sitting behind a computer screen. Get in front of people and let them do the teaching.
In listening to a podcast episode of “The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Podcast”, I was pleased to hear her articulate some of the issues with gaining digital credibility. I’m paraphrasing, but she stated something quite similar to, “It is easier to bypass the work it takes to be humble when much, if not all, of our ‘work’ takes place from behind a computer screen.” Think about how people “sold themselves” in job interviews or to prospective romantic partners prior to Tinder or Microsoft Teams. Not only were we responsible for wearing real pants, we were expected to demonstrate some degree of professionalism through our body language, our verbal language, our communicative abilities, and our knowledge of the role. Now, with much of our understanding being polluted by the illusion of explanatory depth, anyone can appear competent. The illusion of explanatory depth is quite straightforward: we believe we know more than we actually do. When we surround ourselves with highly approving people who unflinchingly agree with us, our poor thinking is only further reinforced. “OMG, you are like, so right! I don’t know why you’re right, but it sounds right!” It’s why it’s imperative we peel ourselves away from ChatGPT and learn things enough to actually be able to explain them, in depth, to real human beings. It’s sadly an increasingly diminishing skillset which, again, has a very straightforward solution. Stop trying to learn by not trying.
I went to school, preschool through graduate degree, when computers were not permitted in the classroom, slides were not posted and sent out to students, and public speaking was a requirement to pass. Professors did not have to take coursework in conflict resolution or social-emotional communication to foster more compassionate relationships with their students. They simply told their students if they measured up or not, and told them to kick it up a notch had they fallen short. They did not offer affirmative reframes of “falling short” of “failing”; you fell short or you failed, and that was that. That was the learning opportunity.
A professor I respected most in graduate school was the woman who kicked all of us out of class because we showed up unprepared to deliver a speech. Straight from the Goggins playbook? Not quite. It’s just good, old-fashioned accountability. Nobody was a little bitch baby; we just failed. My favorite teacher of all-time, Mr. Panitch, is probably one of the two males I look up to in my life, and a close second only to my Dad. Mr. Panitch couldn’t care any less if you were nervous, you were terrified, your dog just died, or you broke your arm on black ice on the way to class. His standards for excellence taught us not to take our fears and our ignorance so seriously, and to remedy our anxiety with courage. A girl who was terrified of public speaking passed out in front of the class, to which Mr. Panitch responded by calling the nurse, giving her a few minutes and a sip of ice water, and still requiring her to finish her speech.
It was also unheard of, when I was finishing school, to email a professor “asking for the slides for review”. This was the duty of the student to come prepared with a notepad, pen, and a listening ear. Accommodations were unprecedented when I was completing my graduate degree not even 10 years ago. We weren’t given questions ahead of time for job interviews; we were expected to understand the material thoroughly enough to be prepared for any form of a question. ChatGPT didn’t review emails to check for more optimal wording. While I’m certainly not making the argument that resources shouldn’t be shared and PowerPoints or lecture slides should be kept hidden, I haven’t seen much critical thinking develop as a result of such abundant sharing. If anything, it’s been the opposite: a complete decay of critical thought. Naval Ravikant states, “The tools for learning are abundant. It's the desire for learning that is scarce.” Do you need a masterclass or a coach? Or do you just need to try?
Perhaps bringing back messy, hard-to-follow, discussion-based and project-based learning will revive our innate need to connect with other people. I frankly am unconvinced that texting or emailing back and forth are passable stand-ins for legitimate interaction. There is such beauty in unpredictable, dysfunctional human beings, and an insistence on speed or optimization has robbed us of that mystery. What will they say next? I’ve mentally prepared and studied this, I feel confident in learning no matter what this person throws at me! I can always say I’m not sure if I don’t know what the answer is. What do they know that I don’t? In one of my favorite college courses I teach, I make my students sit across from each other in chairs about 3 feet apart and stare at each other for 60 consecutive seconds. No laughing, no smiling, no muttering that they feel so awkward. They’re then asked to debate one another without staring down at their iPhone, and without using a surface-level archive of social media screenshots containing likely inaccurate information. They’re tasked with developing their own opinions on issues based on what they’ve learned thus far, their own personal experience, what they’ve come to learn about all perspectives on a matter, and their understanding of where their partner may be coming from. My response to “but that’s so weird”?: “so what?”
It can be jarring to realize that people we’ve idolized are actually giant assholes, or are shallow and uninformed. Remember when Ellen DeGeneres was exposed as a tyrant? WHAT?! The lovable lesbian show host with spunk and a proclivity for pranks is not only mean, but she doesn’t write any of her own jokes?! I suppose this is the way the world has always been: there are songwriters who gain zero recognition but continue on because of their love of words and music. Hosts of snarky TV specials rarely write their own jokes, but possess a charm and personality that perhaps their writers do not have (or even want). Copy-and-paste comes in many forms. And, make no mistake: it serves solely the purpose of entertainment. The advent of the internet has proven itself, repeatedly, to be one which values drama over logic, and theatrics over legitimate information. This is not a reason to focus our efforts on being entertaining over being informative, at least if we claim to want to help people.
The basics will work time and time again. You do not lack coaches or resources or templates or PowerPoints, you lack effort, discipline, and perseverance. This is okay; we all do, occasionally. You’re not a bad person because of it, you just need to radically accept that the problem isn’t other people. The problem is your attitude.
Build it, and they will come.
Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
